April 18, 2014

Big Blog Changes Effective Immediately: Rebooting What We Cover and How We Cover It

All apologies for the delays! This should have happened a few months ago, but I was hoping I could find a way to continue with the original blog-format. It did not work out. Effective immediately, we are pushing the reset + reboot buttons on the Noisy Blogs, we are changing What We Cover and How We Cover it. Here is the situation...

The Camera Deals blog continues
The Camera Deals blog (with full-text RSS feed) is a fairly self-contained project and will continue. This will also allow us to pay more attention to it. We are evaluating whether to switch it to Wordpress which offers more flexibility and more features.

The Review Streams will no longer be updated
The Camera Reviews and Lens reviews streams will no longer be updated. Both of them depend heavily on the newscycle (see section below) and will not continue.

The Big Change: We Are Getting Out of the News Cycle!
We are officially getting out of the 24 x 7 x 365 chasing the "News Cycle" and trying to always keep up with the "timeline" and the latest news and reviews and announcements. This is what caused most of the delays in updates. Most of the original blog format depended on always being up to date. Unfortunately this relentless non-stop chasing the news stopped being fun many months ago and the cumulative effects of the burnout refused to go away no matter what I tried to counter them. I can't tell you how much of a relief this is for me to lift this burden.

What Will Get Covered Going Forward?
When I say reset and reboot buttons, I mean it! Nothing is off-limits. Anything goes. This will likely develop organically as time goes by. The key here is to be "stretchable", focus on things that don't require round-the-clock baby-sitting of the news-cycle. Also we have to make it fun again. And triangulate on the things people are interested in reading with things I am interested in covering with things I am capable of covering. One thing is for sure, the original format is not coming back :(

So sometimes we may have a lot of posts, sometimes not. Sometimes we may cover news-related topics, sometimes we won't. We will likely pay more attention to content generation versus never-ending news and reviews round-ups. Various ideas and experiments are on paper and in the air. It is a reboot! Getting out of the newscycle, it gives us flexibility. If there are any topics of the non-newscycle nature you would like to see covered, please let us know! All ideas are welcome!

Finite Time and Energy
I understand that you may be upset, disappointed, frustrated, angry, etc, etc, etc. I am too when one of my favorite websites/blogs does something like this. Unfortunately none of the previous 20,000+ blog-posts (from the very short to the very long) wrote themselves. This was a very demanding project time-wise and effort-wise and required a lot of big and small sacrifices. While this was not a non-profit blog, we were running it as a semi-non-profit in the sense that we avoided most of the annoying-to-readers revenue-generating activities (conventional sponsors, annoying ads of every kind, appeasing manufacturers and fanboys, etc, etc, etc).

Where to Get Camera News?
The internet changed a lot since we started doing this. Now there are many more ways to get to the latest news. There's Twitter and Google+ and Facebook and Pinterest and Linked In and many more social networks that light up when something of interest happens. There are thousands of photography forums at every corner of the internets. Both Imaging Resource and dpreview increased their news coverage. You can find most of the buzzworthy stories at Petapixel. You can get the headlines of many photo-related websites at Alltop Photography in a snapshot. You can easily create custom topics of interest at Flipboard, Zite, Taptu, Blinkfeed, News360, and many other similar services, deilvered right to your smartphone or tablet or web browser. RSS readers and apps are available for all desktop and mobile platforms, even QVGA cellphones. Etc, etc, etc.